HCIL 2020–2021 News Roundup
Our brilliant sparkling lights in a Stygian year.
I’m sitting outside on my porch, with the sun shining brightly and the cicadas timidly starting to buzz, and thinking back over a long and often sorrowful year. Writing this news roundup made me think about all the amazing (and often invisible) work so many people in the HCIL put in this year to change research methods and lab meetings, move classes fully online, and increase the amount of emotional support provided to their students, move the weekly HCIL Brown Bags fully online, and move the annual Symposium fully online — all this while simultaneously taking care of their partners, children, elders, and newer colleagues (like myself). Somehow, amidst all this, my colleagues still managed to gather accolades at an astounding rate! And on the really hard days, it was always so heartening to hear the good news — whether that was a best paper nomination, a grant, or a new puppy — to remind us that we are all here together, as a community, holding the torch up high.
Here follows the HCIL 2020–2021 news roundup!
Summer 2020
Leilani Battle was recognized as a Visionary in MIT Technology Review’s 35 under 35 for her incredible (need I say, visionary?) work with enormous arrays of data. Congratulations, Leilani!
August was a big month for Michelle Mazurek and her students/colleagues:
- Michelle, her students Daniel Votipka and Kelsey Fulton, and other colleagues received the Distinguished Paper Award from USENIX Security for their paper “Understanding security mistakes developers make: Qualitative analysis from Build It, Break It, Fix It”
- Michelle, her student Noel Warford, iSchool alumna Elissa Redmiles, and other colleagues received the Distinguished Paper Award from USENIX Security for their paper “A comprehensive quality evaluation of security and privacy advice on the web”
- Daniel Votipka received the 2020 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award for his “excellence in research and dedication to mentorship and community service.”
Fall 2020
Jonathan Lazar received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility from ACM SIGACCESS, in “recognition of his life-long dedication to the goal of accessible technologies and digital content through his research, education, advocacy, policy and legal work.”
Catherine Plaisant received the Visualization Career Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee in recognition of her significant research contributions to this community. See Catherine accept this prestigious award here.
Emma Dixon and Amanda Lazar’s paper, “The Role of Sensory Changes in Everyday Technology Use by People with Mild to Moderate Dementia,” received a Best Paper nomination from ACM ASSETS.
Michelle Mazurek received the DARPA Young Faculty Award for her proposal “Generalizing to Understudied Populations Through the Lens of Key Privacy Challenges.” This award targets “rising stars” — congratulations, Michelle!
Yuhan Luo was awarded the Dr. Joan Giesecke Health Informatics Fellowship from the iSchool — congratulations, Yuhan!
Spring 2021
Amanda Lazar received the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious early career award for her CAREER grant “Advancing Remote Collaboration: Inclusive Design for People with Dementia.”
Jonathan Lazar was named to the SIGCHI Academy, in recognition of his influence on and leadership within the field of HCI.
Young-Ho Kim, Eun Kyoung Choe and colleagues received an Honorable Mention Award for their SIGCHI paper, “Data@Hand: Fostering Visual Exploration of Personal Data on Smartphones Leveraging Speech and Touch Interaction” — congratulations!
Leilani Battle received the VMware Early Career Faculty Grant, which recognizes “the next generation of exceptional faculty members” — Leilani, we will miss you as your journey takes you away from UMD, but we’re incredibly happy that you are receiving this well deserved recognition!
Research Sponsors
Researchers in the HCIL were funded this year by a wide variety of sponsors, including:
- Adobe
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Department of Defense
- Department of Education
- Federal Highway Administration (FHA)
- Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)
- Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
- National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)
- National Institutes of Health — National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
- National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Office of Naval Research
- Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
- Spencer Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
We could not have accomplished all of this without your support — thank you thank you thank you!
HCIL’s 2020–2021 was rough, like everyone’s, but we are thrilled to be celebrating our amazing people who persevered through, kept racking up the accomplishments, and supported each other. We also want to take a moment to celebrate those who did not get external recognition for their work because they were too busy focusing on family, students, and other unsung heroics: we see you, and THANK YOU.
